Apple's iPad beats PC vendors in market share

The iPad has been a great success for Apple, giving the company a 17.2 percent share of Q4 2010 mobile PC shipments. And it’s pushed Apple to the top of the DisplaySearch market share ranking.

According to the analyst company’s preliminary results, Apple shipped more than 10.2 million notebook and tablet PCs combined. It also trumped HP by shipping more than a million more units.

Richard Shim, senior analyst at DisplaySearch said: “While we anticipate increased competition in the tablet PC market later this year with the introduction of Android Honeycomb-based tablets, Apple’s iPad business is complementing a notebook line whose shipments widely exceed the industry average growth rate.”

“Apple is currently benefiting from significant and comprehensive growth from both sectors of the mobile PC spectrum, notebooks and tablet PCs. Cannibalisation seems limited at this point.”

However, Apple may have competition with Toshiba being the only company to hit a year-on-year shipment growth. Despite ranking as number five, the company increased its sales by 15 percent to 5.1 million in the last quarter of 2010.

HP, Acer and Dell took the second, third and fourth positions, respectively with DisplaySearch claiming that these top five brands accounted for 65.4 percent of the total mobile PC market.

It also found that in this quarter worldwide mobile PC shipments – including tablet PCs – reached 59.6 million. This was up eight percent quarter on quarter and 17 percent year on year.

However, it wasn’t all good with the growth of notebook PC shipments being weak during this quarter. The figures were up by only four percent quarter and quarter and one percent year on year.